One afternoon, he felt strong and asked Laura to help him to the balcony where the family held its afternoon gatherings. He’d lost so much weight that she could have carried him as she hadn’t since he was small, before he went away with Mutti and the aunts in Xalapa. Now the mother could reproach herself for that abandonment, for her spurious reasons—Juan Francisco was beginning his political career, there was no time for the boys, and worse, Laura Díaz was going to live her independent life, her sons were excess baggage like her husband, she was a provincial girl married young to a man seventeen years older than she; it was her turn to live, take risks, learn, was the nun Gloria Soriano merely a pretext for her to leave home? The time with Orlando Ximénez and Carmen Cortina, with Diego and Frida in Detroit, was no time to be carrying around a child who himself carried so much promise, this Santiago with a brow so clear that glory, creation, and beauty could be read there. Never, she swore to herself, would she neglect to take care of this child, who always, always contained all the promise, all the beauty, all the tenderness, and all the creation in the world.
Now the lost time suddenly materialized before her with the face of guilt. Was that why Santiago did not express gratitude: had her maternal care come too late? Being a mother excluded any desire for gratitude or recognition. It should be enough in itself without argument or expectation, like the instant of sufficient tenderness.
Laura sat down with her son opposite the urban landscape. It really was undergoing a transformation: like a forest of proliferating mushrooms, skyscrapers were popping up everywhere, the old cabs were changed for taxis whose meters seemed incomprehensible and made their clients suspicious, the broken-down buses were replaced by gigantic vehicles belching black smoke like bat breath, yellow trolleys with their varnished yellow wooden benches and their route maps were replaced by threatening electric buses that looked like prehistoric beasts.
People no longer came home to eat at two in the afternoon and went back to work at five. They began living the gringo novelty of the unbroken workday. Organ grinders were disappearing, along with ragmen and knife and scissor sharpeners. Street-corner stores and tobacco stands were dying, and the rival telephone companies finally united: Laura remembered Jorge Maura (she barely ever thought of him now) and lost track of what Santiago was saying on the balcony, sitting barefoot in his robe. I love you, city, my city, I love you because you dare to show your soul in your body, I love you because you think with your skin, because you won’t let me see you if I haven’t dreamed you first, like the conquistadors, because even if you’ve been left dry, lake city, you have compassion, and you fill my hands with water when I have to put up with tears, because you let me name you only by seeing you and see you only by naming you, thank you for inventing me so I could try to reinvent you, Mexico City, thank you for letting me speak to you without guitars and colors and bullets, sing to you with promises of dust, promises of wind, promises never to forget you, promises to revive you even if I disappear, promises to name you, promises to see you in the dark, Mexico City, in exchange for a single gift from you: keep on seeing me when I’m no longer here, sitting on the balcony, with my mother next to me …
“To whom are you speaking, son?”
“To your beautiful hands, Mama.”
… To the childhood that was my second mother, to the youth which happens only once, to the nights I shall no longer see, to the dreams I leave her so the city will care for them, to Mexico City which will go on waiting for me forever …
“I love you, city, I love you.”
Laura, leading him back to bed, understood that everything her son was saying to the world he was saying to her. He didn’t have to be explicit; words might betray him. Brought out into the open, a love that could live without words in the deep, moist terrain of daily company might dry out. The silence between the two of them could be eloquent.
“I don’t want to be a pain, I don’t want to be a bother.”
Silence. Tranquillity. Solitude. That’s what unites us, thought Laura, holding Santiago’s burning hand in her own. There is no greater respect or tenderness than that of being together and silent, living together but living the one for the other without ever saying so. With no need to say so. Being explicit might betray that deep tenderness which was only revealed in a skein of complicities, suppositions, and acts of grace.
Laura and Santiago saw all this while he was dying, both of them knowing he was dying, but both accomplices, knowing, and thankful one for the other because the only thing they wordlessly decided to eliminate was compassion. The shining eyes of the boy, sinking deeper and deeper by the day, asked the world and the mother, the two forever identified in the son’s spirit: Who has the right to take pity on me? Don’t betray me with pity … I’ll be a man to the end.
It was hard for her not to feel sorry for her son, not only not showing her sorrow but eliminating it from her spirit and from her very eyes. Not just hiding it, but not having it, because Santiago’s wide-awake, electric senses could detect it instantly. It’s possible to betray with compassion; those were words Laura would repeat as she fell asleep, now every night on a cot next to her feverish and emaciated son, the son of promise, the adored child.
“My son, what do you need, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, Mama, what can I do for you?”
“You know I wish I could steal all the glories and virtues from the world and give them to you.”
“Thank you. But you already did, didn’t you know?”
“What else? Something else?”
What else. Something else. Sitting on the edge of Santiago’s bed, Laura Daz suddenly recalled a conversation between the two brothers she had accidentally overheard when Santiago, who always left his bedroom door open, was, extraordinarily, talking to Danton.
Papa and Mama are all confused about us, surmised Danton, they imagine too many roads for each of us … How good it is our ambitions don’t conflict, replied Santiago, so we don’t take any shortcuts … Even so, Danton persisted, you think your ambition is good and mine is bad, right? No, Santiago made clear, it isn’t that yours is bad and mine good or vice versa; we’re condemned to carry them out, or at least to try to. Condemned? Danton laughed. Condemned?
Now Danton was married to Magdalena Ayub Longoria and was living, as he’d always wished, on Avenida de Los Virreyes in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. He’d been spared the neo-baroque horrors of Polanco but not because of his in-laws’ wishes. Even so, he dreamed of living in a house with straight lines and undistracting geometries. Laura saw her second son less and less. She rationalized that he too was guilty for not visiting her but acknowledged she was anxiously looking after Santiago. She didn’t have to seek him out because there he was, weakened by recurring sicknesses, right at home. He wasn’t her prisoner. Santiago was a young artist with a destiny no one could destroy because it was the destiny of art, of artworks that would ultimately outlive the artist.
Touching Santiago’s fevered forehead, Laura wondered, nevertheless, if this young artist, her son, hadn’t brought together beginning and ending too quickly. The tortured and erotic figures in his paintings weren’t a promise but a conclusion. They weren’t a beginning but, irremediably, an ending. They were all finished works. Understanding that anguished her, because Laura Díaz wanted to see in her son the complete realization of a personality whose felicity depended on his creativity It was unfair that his body was betraying him, and that the body, calamitously, didn’t depend on will—Santiago’s or his mother’s.
But she was in no mood to give up. She watched her abstracted, absorbed son working, painting alone and only for himself, as it should be, whatever the fate of the painting may be, my son is going to reveal his gifts, but will not have time for his conquests, he’s going to work, to imagine, but will not have time to produce: his painting is an inevitability, that’s the reward, my son doesn’t take the place of another, and no one can take his place in what he and he alone can do, it doesn’t matter
for how long; there is no frustration in his work, even if his life is cut short, his progress is astonishing, dedicating oneself to art means one revelation after another, going from surprise to surprise.
“Everything good is work,” the young Santiago would say as he painted. “The artist doesn’t exist.”
“You’re an artist,” Laura said boldly to him. “Your brother is a mercenary. That’s the difference.”
Santiago laughed, almost accusing her of being vulgarly obvious.
“No, Mama, it’s good that we’re different instead of being divided from within.”
She repented her banality. She didn’t want to make comparisons, neither critical nor reductive. She wanted to tell him it’s been wonderful watching you grow, change, generate new life, I never want to ask myself, could my son have been great? Because you already are great, I watch you paint, and I see you as if you were going to live to be one hundred, my adored son, I listened to you from the first moment, ever since you asked me without saying a word, mother, father, brother, help me to get what’s inside me out, let me present myself.
She never fully understood that request, especially when she remembered another overheard conversation between the brothers, when Danton told Santiago that the good thing about the body is that it can satisfy us at any moment, and Santiago told him it can also betray us at any moment; and that’s why you’ve got to catch pleasure on the fly, replied Danton, and Santiago: “Other satisfactions cost dearly, you have to work for them,” and then both in one voice: “They escape from us,” followed by a shared fraternal laugh.
Danton was afraid of nothing but sickness and death. That’s true of many men. They can fight hand to hand in a trench but be unable to endure witnessing the pain of childbirth. He sought and found pretexts for not visiting his parents’ house on Avenida Sonora. He preferred to telephone, ask for Santiago even though Santiago hated telephones—the most horrifying distraction ever invented to torture artists, how great it was when he was a boy and there were the two systems, Ericsson and Mexicana, when it was hard to communicate.
He looked at Laura.
That was before the sicknesses followed one after the other ever more rapidly, and the doctors could find no explanation for the boy’s increasing weakness, his low resistance to infection, the incomprehensible wearing down of his immunological system, and what the doctors didn’t say, what only Laura Daz said, my son has to live out his own life, I’ll see to that, nothing—not sicknesses, not useless medicines, not medical advice—matters to me, what I must give my son is everything my son should have if he were going to live for a hundred years, I’m going to give my son the love, the satisfaction, the conviction that he lacked nothing in the years of his life, nothing, nothing, nothing.
She watched over him at night as he slept, wondering, what can I save of my son the artist that will last beyond the echo of death? Surprised, she admitted that she wanted not only that her son might have what he deserved but that she, Laura Díaz, might have what her son could give her. He needed to receive. She did, too. She wanted to give. Did he?
Like all painters, Santiago the Younger, when he could still move freely, liked to step back from his paintings, to see them at a certain distance.
“I look for them as if they were lovers, but I re-create them as ghosts.” He tried to laugh.
She answered those words in silence later on, when Santiago could no longer get out of bed, and she had to lie down next to him to console him, to be literally at his side, supporting him. “I don’t want to be deprived of you.”
She didn’t want to be deprived, she meant, of that part of herself that was her son.
“Tell me your plans, your ideas.”
“You speak as if I were going to live a hundred years.”
“A century fits into a day of success,” whispered Laura, with no fear of banality.
Santiago simply laughed. “Is being successful worthwhile?”
“No,” she surmised. “Sometimes absence, silence are better.”
Laura was not going to compile a list of things a boy of great talent, dying at the age of twenty-six, was not going to do, to know, to enjoy. The young painter was like a frame without a painting which she would have liked to fill with her own experiences and with their shared promises, she would have liked to bring her son to Detroit to see Diego’s mural in the Arts Institute, she would have liked both of them to go to the legendary museums, the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Mauritshuis, the Prado.
She would have wanted …
Sleeping with you, entering your bed, extracting from nearness and dreams the forms, visions, challenges, the very strength I wish I could give you when I touch you, when I whisper in your ear, your final weakness threatens me more than it does you and I want to test your strength, tell you that your strength and mine depend on each other, that my caresses, Santiago, are your caresses, those you didn’t have, will never have, accept my nearness, accept the body of your mother, do nothing, son, I bore you, I carried you inside me, I am you and you are me, what I do is what you would do, your heat is my heat, my body is your body, do nothing, I’ll do it for you, say nothing, I’ll say it for you, forget this night, I’ll remember it always for you.
“My son, what do you need, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, Mama, what can I do for you?”
“You know I wish I could steal all the glories and virtues from the world and give them to you.”
“Thank you. But you already did, didn’t you know?”
They wouldn’t say it, ever. Santiago loved as if he were dreaming. Laura dreamed as if she were loving. Their bodies became again as they were at the beginning, the seed of each one in the womb of the other. She was reborn in him. He killed her in one single night. She did not want to think about anything. She allowed fugitive, whirling, lost images to pass through her mind, the perfume of the rain in Xalapa, the tree of smoke in Catemaco, the jewel-encrusted goddess in El Zapotal, the bloody hands washing themselves in the river, the green stick in the desert, the araucaria tree in Veracruz, the river flowing with a shriek into the Gulf, the five chairs on the balcony opposite Chapultepec, the six place settings and the napkins rolled up in their silver rings, the doll Li Po, Santiago her brother sinking dead into the sea, the severed fingers of Grandmother Cosima, the arthritic fingers of Aunt Hilda trying to play the piano, the ink-stained fingers of the poet aunt, Virginia, the urgent busy fingers of Mutti Leticia preparing a huachinango in the Catemaco, the Veracruz, the Xalapa kitchens, Auntie’s swollen feet dancing danzones in the Plaza de Armas, Orlando’s open arms inviting her to waltz at the hacienda, the love of Jorge, love, love …
“Thank you. Didn’t you know?”
“What else? Something else.”
“Don’t leave the birdcages open.”
“They’d come back. They are good and loving birds.”
“But cats aren’t like that.”
She hugged him tight. She did not close her eyes, hugging her son. She looked around, the white frames, the already finished paintings leaning one against the other like sleeping infantrymen, an army of colors, a parade of possible looks that would be able or never would be able to give their momentary life to the canvas, each one the owner of a double existence, that of being looked at and not.
“I dreamed about what happens to the paintings when they lock up the museums and they’re left alone all night.”
That was Santiago the Younger’s theme. The naked couples that look at each other and never touch, as if they knew, modestly, they were being looked at. The bodies in his paintings were not beautiful, not classical, they had a certain emaciated, even demonic aspect. They were a temptation, not that of coupling but that of being seen, surprised, in the moment of constituting themselves as a couple. That was their beauty, expressed in pale gray or very tenuous rose tones, where the flesh stood out like an intrusion unforeseen by God, as if in the artistic world of Santiago, God had not conceived of this intruder, his rival, the
human being.
“Don’t think I’m just resigning myself to not living. I’m not. resigning myself to not working. I don’t know, for days now, the sun hasn’t shone on my head in the morning as it used to before. Would you open the curtains, Mama?”
After opening the curtains so the light would come in, Laura turned around to look at Santiago’s bed. Her son was no longer there. All that remained was a silent lament floating in the air.
17.
Lanzarote: 1949
1.
YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE. COME HERE. This island doesn’t exist. It’s a mirage in the African desert. It’s a stone raft detached from Spain. It’s a Mexican volcano that forgot to erupt. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there. By steamer, you will approach a black fortress that leaps out of the Atlantic like a phantom far from Europe. Lanzarote is the stone ship anchored precariously off the sands of Africa, but the stone of the island is hotter than the desert sun.
Everything you see is false, it is our daily cataclysm, it happened last night, it hasn’t had time yet to make itself into history, and it will disappear at any moment, just as it appeared, in the twinkling of an eye. You look at the mountains of fire that dominate the landscape and remember that barely two centuries ago they didn’t exist. The highest and strongest peaks on the island were just born and they were born destroying, burying the humble vineyards in molten lava, and no sooner had the first eruption subsided a hundred years ago, than the volcano yawned again and with its breath burned all the plants and buried all the roofs.
You shouldn’t have come here. What brought you to me again? Nothing of this is real. How could a mountain range of sand and a lake of azure blue stronger than the blue of sea or sky fit within a crater under the sea? How I’d love to meet you under the waves, where you and I could again become like two ghosts of the ocean that was always separating us. Are we going to reunite now, you and I, on a tremulous island where fire is buried alive?